Why do many salespeople remain faithful believers in obsolete selling strategies? We are talking about intelligent, successful salespeople. People whom, if they opened their minds to a totally new concept, could easily double their income without working any harder. That question has puzzled and frustrated us during the 14 years that we have been in the sales training business.

We have trained a great many salespeople who have doubled and even quadrupled their sales. Most of them have recommended our training to a lot of their friends and colleagues. Usually a few of their friends and colleagues enroll in our training courses. But, that's not we expected.

We expected that, when our graduates went back to their companies and had dramatic increases in production, most of the other salespeople would demand to learn High Probability Selling. We expected that their managers would want to replicate that kind of performance by training their entire sales force. But, that doesn't happen very often. Most often, the other salespeople, and their sales managers will not believe that the tremendous increases in our graduate's sales productivity is due to learning a new sales process. Rather, they believe that the sudden success is due to luck, or a previously hidden talent, or to an increase in motivation.

We couldn't figure out why they just don't get the reality of it. David B. Wolfe, a new paradigm marketing strategist from Reston, VA, addresses this phenomenon in a recent essay. It seems to be a question of which of their needs is more important to them. The following is an excerpt from David's essay.

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How often do you find yourself pressing a point that you know to the core of your being is right, only to be frustrated because some people just "can't get it"?

Imagine you are walking down the street 450 years ago when a friend runs up to you and says it has been discovered that, "The earth is not flat! It's round, like a ball. Not only that, it turns around the sun!" You tell your friend to go home and sleep it off because you know that from the highest hill or mountaintop the panoramic view shows no sign of the earth being round like a ball, and you know from first-hand observation that every day the sun shines it rises in the east and sets in the west in its daily journey around the earth.

Would you believe that some people schooled in societies like our own still believe the earth is flat? To see for yourself, type in "Flat Earth society" at Google. Those who believe the earth is flat do so because they need to believe so. After all, belief follows need.

We believe what we need to believe to have guidance in our pursuit of a sense of personal validity, safety and comfort. Once such a set of beliefs is in place, challenges to them are usually met with fight or flight responses. We argue in defense of our beliefs or flee from notions that contradict them. We are prone to denying ideas that contradict our beliefs any landing rights in our minds.

Much like Copernicus's repositioning of the earth from the center of the universe around which celestial bodies revolve, most people of that day could not "get it." As Albert Einstein said, "A problem cannot be solved in the same consciousness that produced it."

©Jacques Werth, High Probability® Selling - All rights reserved.

Jacques Werth, author of "High Probability Selling," is an internationally respected Sales Trainer and Sales Consultant. HPS graduates are excelling as Top Producers in over 70 industries. Visit http://www.highprobsell.com to read more articles, preview the book, and learn more about High Probability Selling.

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